Yes, that’s the impression I got out of it too. I disapprove either way. I’d sooner defend a good argument against my point than a bad argument in favour of it.
I come to HN for reasoned, thoughtful, curious discussion.
Unfortunately, this gets you some comments that want to disagree with that less specific, initial aside. I’m not sure if people just read the first paragraph and respond entirely based on that, without realizing that it is not the main point of the rest of the post. Or if they just don’t want to give up the ground that you did in the beginning, at all, so they knowingly ignore the rest of the post.
I don’t really know what to do about this sort of thing. It seems like… generally nice to be able to start a post with something that says basically: look I’ve thought about this and it isn’t an uninformed reflexive take. But I’m trying to give up on that sort of thing. It isn’t really logically part of the argument, and it ends with people arguing in a direction that I’m not really interested in defending against in this context.
But it does seem a shame, because, while it isn’t logically part of the argument, it is nice to know beforehand how firm somebody’s stance is.
This is clearly incorrect to some, not to others. This point being unclear to some, leads to those people assuming that the commonly observed strong negativity is generalized response to all shape and form of new technologies, rather than that specific emotional reaction to current generation of still somewhat Lovecraftian generative AI outputs.
A bit like what if a non-vision super LLM was to characterize anti-genAI sentiment and create "techno-luddite artist" persona. But there's across-modal component to it that they don't capture, so that falls flat.
I think another, perhaps more relevant reference could be the replacement of hand-painted cells with computer-generated frames for animation. It replaced one kind of artist with another. Nobody got all that worked up about it, in the long run.
But the discussion is a little better if we take a little sip every now and then, perhaps even slightly performatively. The “ground-state” of big open Internet discussion sites like this is dismissive and cheap, so it is good to have active pushback occasionally.